I find it rather hilarious how many mechanisms we have for communication these days.
But what is very interesting is the inconsistency of it all.
I use the following means to communicate to my peers at work:
Internet Messaging
Work Telephone Number
Mobile Telephone Number
Email
Home Telephone Number
Pager
Due to cost reduction efforts, many workers no longer have work cell phones nor pagers. But some do. Furthermore, many of us permit others to call us on our personal mobile phones but don't publish these numbers in the official directories.
Next, for a variety of reasons different individuals seem to prefer one channel over another. I often go very long periods without even bothering to check voice-mail (which when coupled with extensive telecommuting renders futile attempts to contact me via that channel). Some in my group simply won't use Internet Messaging. Some aren't as responsive to email.
A lot of this has to do with various coping mechanisms or frustrations. Some who do use IM get rather frustrated when half-a-dozen of us in a virtual meeting all conclude we need to involve them. Simultaneously they'll get half-a-dozen IMs asking questions or inviting them to join the meeting. Others of us cascade avenues of contact to minimize extra work. Those that need to know (i.e. management or close peers) do know how to reach us but all others are kept at arm's length so as to be able to prioritize work and avoid getting buried.
When I here the complaints of these workers regarding Blackberries, it seems as if they're rather afraid of the expectation of fast response to email. At the moment they likely have any old excuse for not responding to email promptly. That'll vanish overnight.
Did anyone notice the stark contrast between the view of the Executives and the workabees?
The Executives believe that the Blackberries can facilitate telecommuting and a balance between life and work. The grunts fear this is just a way to ensure longer workdays.
Why do you think that might be?
Could it be that relative to the workers, the execs don't really have that much work to balance with their life?
I think there is at least one other very important aspect here relative to telecommuting. Telecommuting really only works when there are a few key ingredients:
Trust. The manager needs to trust the worker.
A way to measure work. I find the managers the most comfortable with telecommuting, flex-time, etc., were those in situations where counting widgets was easy. If there is no clear way to measure output, this becomes a bit more of a challenge.
Good management, including proper escalation. My current management has clearly expressed that they expect routine escalation since we're understaffed. We're all comfortable about it since it then becomes the manager's job to prioritize. A bad manager simply attempts to appease everyone and twist the arms of employees to get them to do everything despite burnout.
If you are in a situation where the environment isn't already very comfortable with flex-time, telecommuting, etc., picking up a device which may lead others to expect immediate responses to email at all hours of the day may be a rather horrible idea.
The second (taller) should be easily verifiable and out of the realm of argument.
The last (smarter) is the most easily debated of the three. It's offensive to most because you have judged yourself to be the smarter one and the other party may not agree. Furthermore, the first two describe where you are helping someone. The last example describes a situation where you may not be helping at all.
You may be stroking your own ego.
You may be judging them as stupid.
You may be impeding their growth by forcing them to continue to be dependent on you rather than helping them learn how to do said task.
You may be asking them to "trust" you more than they're willing. I can immediately see proof if you're able to lift said object. It's not nearly as clear for a great number of situations how to assess so quickly if you're truly as smart as you think you are. Furthermore, "smart" people are often very sloppy in their ability to document or to state clearly the reasons behind their conclusions. You may think faster, but it may not mean you think more clearly or more correctly.
Do a bit of reading on the Suzuki method of teaching children how to play musical instruments. I'd suggest this here for a few reasons. First, Suzuki's fundamental underpinning of his entire work is simply that TALENT IS NOT INNATE. He absolutely did not support the idea you've presented that some people simply have more music ability. Next, this may help you understand what this new research is and is not stating.
It takes motivation, persistence AND some method of proper feedback for helpful assessment and correction.
For the Suzuki method, the feedback is (at least) two-fold: lots of guided practice from teachers and parents and an enormous amount of active listening so that your mind gets attuned to how things should sound.
Let's say for example, I'd like to develop perfect pitch. If I simply start singing "do-re-mi"'s all day long, I'll very likely just make things worse. I will probably lay down deep patterns of doing it the wrong way. I'd have to spend even more time to unlearn/relearn. But if I use something like a tuner or a computer program to assist/evaluate, then I imagine after a few thousand times of doing this, I'd get much, much better.
This recent research isn't suggesting any such nonsense as motivation and desire could make someone a great guitarist in a month. Nor that the most motivated and persistent would be the best after a month.
It's simply rather clearly and poignantly demonstrating a significant and measurable difference of what happens in children's approaches to learning and challenges when you focus praise on either 1) intelligence ("you're so smart") or 2) effort ("you really worked hard"). The praise of a state ("smart") influences kids to switch to a mode of protecting that image to a degree which impedes learning whereas the praise of the "hard work" influences them to tackle challenges with relish.
The results were so immediate and clear that it'd be like a medical study where the study was simply cut short and those given placebos were immediately switched to the real thing.
Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
on
Spying On Tor
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· Score: 1
Isn't this just pretty much a direct consequence of the nature of TOR pretty much assuming that everyone uses it the way it was intended?
Or otherwise stated, TOR is like a flock of sheep where a wolf cannot bite down on one since they're all on some sort of merry-go-round? But a wolf could simply hop on the merry-go-round and feast?
As the article has repeated, if you're interested in security it seems you really ought to apply your own encryption on top of TOR.
However, even if you do that are you truly anonymous? Is there any way to determine both ends of a conversation (either email or sessions)?
And lest anyone forget this is a VERY REAL example...
I really had only barely paid attention to this issue till the patch for 2.3. Even then I often simply set up the download and forget about it. I simply wanted to download it early on Tuesday hours before I'd want to play.
But all of a sudden I realized my laptop (different PC) for work was incredibly sluggish. Pings via the VPN had shot up to well over 3 to 4 seconds. Pings from the PC downloading the patch were just as bad. Pings on the internal network (including to/from the PC downloading the patch) were absolutely fine.
Sure enough, once the download was done service went back to normal.
This is a completely legitimate, illegal in no way whatsoever, activity that is being hampered by this strange approach from this ISP.
The sorts of communications involved in MMORPGs are actually very similar to communications for a good amount of IT and consulting work.
Consider working remotely from home, multi-tasking with several IM chat conversations underway simultaneous with one or more telephone conference calls. This doesn't see too far from chats in game and coordination via email or phone in parallel.
Learning how to coordinate and guide these "self-isolated, socially inept, hyper-competitive" may indeed be similar in gaming and in IT and consulting work.
This doesn't discount your point that the majority of gamers may be such. But some are going to learn to excel in pulling these together to get stuff done.
However, having said that, your point about clarity is very important. Even when you work entirely remotely, the ability to think clearly and communicate in a measured, clear and appropriate fashion is enormously important. Gaming isn't the only place we see horrible communication these days though...
Nah... The movie that comes to my mind is completely different.
I am getting a picture of very clean cut, tall, dainty and somewhat immortal lithe man (with bow strapped across back, of course) darting back and forth across the plain. He sniffs here, looks there, describing what the signs indicate happened (all while you're seeing flashbacks to millions of years ago where the pack of raptors were hauling tail across the terrain with two little midget dinos tied to a couple raptors' backs because some dark T-Rex said "don't eat them".
I'm rather certain the root of your woes is Comcast. I am not certain it's intentional.
Furthermore, the problem is very likely far more simple and less sophisticated than this issue of packet spoofing.
Set up a continuous ping to something "nearby" (your gateway, your DNS ser ver, your neighbor, whatever) in your Comcast network and tee it to a file. Leave it up for days and you'll likely see periods of time where you have no service for patches of time... often long enough to kill sessions.
I very often have problems with any sort of sessions (SSH, VPN, etc.) staying up for long periods of time because the underlying line level reliability is so poor. I can watch my cable modem logs and see many resets, timeouts, etc.
I laugh whenever asked about phone service via Comcast. Sadly, however, this pathetic reliability also precludes Vonage and the like. And I find this a bit sad since while I do not consider Comcast capable of running a world class network, I loathe the phone company. Those guys are more competent but much more directly evil.
You're missing the larger point so badly you're wandering into a more grevious error.
The rights were declared "unalienable".
From the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
Note "self-evident" and "unalienable"!
Don't get hung up on reference to a Creator or a Diety. The idea here is that we didn't have to fight for these rights. We didn't have to steal them from the British or any other ruling power. We simply have always had them. To a theist, this is "given" or "endowed" by a Creator. But the principle that these rights are completely innate is not dependent on theism.
Maybe Randi's efforts don't truly matter in the grand scheme of things as one poster has mentioned.
But if there's one thing that website can do a very good job of, it's helping people understand the importance of and difficulty of crafting and executing proper double-blind tests.
I imagine I've been trolled. But your trivial snippets of "tests" of music or literature appreciation wouldn't in anyway shape or form qualify as double-blind tests. Goodness, I wouldn't even consider them anything other than cheap stunts providing no meaningful results whatsoever.
Please take the time to wander over to the JREF and especially the forums where you can read excruciatingly thorough discussions on the many audiophile type claims that are very similar to this. There is a great deal of information there provided by the claimants and forum members who have worked to hash out double-blind tests.
It should be painfully obvious the author is Indian discussing Indian upper education. As such, it should be expected he'd use Indian Numbering rather than what you're used to.
I'm willing to cast a bit of doubt on the "innate" fear of strangers.
Do a bit of research on "attachment disorder" as it pertains to adopted children. Very often, young children when adopted demonstrate very little fear of strangers. Most of this is due to the fact that they have no attachment, per se, to their new family. Indeed, the root of this problem is that they may have never yet formed any deep attachment whatsoever. So, to them there is no inherent difference between their family and strangers. It's not that they fear and distrust everyone. It's more normal that they fear no one. They'll gleefully go home with anyone.
It's not at all uncommon for adoptive parents to have to train their new children with regards to "fear of strangers".
I believe that in the case of the Holocaust, you could make a very strong argument that indeed history was written by the conquered.
You can argue about motives, desires, aspirations, the collusion of the larger European society, the involvement of neutral countries, specifically their banks... You can debate any number of points.
But the funny thing is...
The Germans kept wonderfully accurate records of what they were doing. They were very meticulous.
In an enormously real way, the victors did not need to write the History of the Holocaust.
Holocaust Denial is an abomination simply because active and willful ignorance is dangerous. Holocaust Denial should be taught, but not as a way to present "balance" here. Instead, it needs to be presented as a psychological and pathological study of why in the world people fight so arduously to reinvent the past rather than to learn from it.
Although teachers that readily admit they will have students smarter than them are rare, they should be applauded. I definitely appreciated the ones I had.
I had a geometry/trigonometry teacher that often told us he expected the students to be smarter than him. Mind you, he wasn't just saying some students would occasionally know a piece of trivia or more about one small subject area. He meant that he firmly believe that he would often have students that were smarter than he was.
He was consistent about this. Once when he was writing a complicated trig proof, I held up my hand to comment. I told him he was being "a masochist" and replace his eight line proof with a two line one. He demonstrated no insecurity about this whatsoever but rather commended my idea. Indeed, I found the insecure teachers to be very dangerous.
Is it any surprise that if we have teachers that believe and inspire their students to believe that they will be smarter, do more, etc., that we progress? Is it any surprise that when teachers believe and force their students to believe that they do not know more and may never know more than they do that we as a nation are on a continued slide downwards by many measures?
When teachers cherish and relish learning and discovery, they inspire and instill this in the students. The blind regurgitation of facts ("dark" side of the moon, freezing temperature, etc.) is all the more disturbing because we don't teach people about how to think about how and why we know such things (which would involve understanding assumptions or exceptions).
Well... Basic likely generates ire because people believe much better programming languages and approaches exist.
If a child starts to learn to hang pictures with tape, well and good. As they grow they'll likely progress to thumbtacks, then nails. Soon they'll learn about screws, anchors, levels, stud-finders, etc. You don't consider it strange that a child hangs their artwork with tape. You find it bizarre when your adult friend attempts to use tape to hang their new Rembrandt. Ire arises when they ask you for help.
Now having said that, you raise a very interesting idea I hadn't considered lately of introducing children to programming with Basic. I imagine you may have to dig back to a "simple" Basic for the benefits, but it may be a good idea to start with simple instructions and logic and then progress to procedural and then object-oriented programming. I seem to remember reading arguments made by those who believe it best to start learning object-oriented first. I am not certain I ever fully agreed with that idea.
Well... First of all, it would appear for the purpose of this discussion we have to shift into a mode of presumed guilt. Notice nowhere in your argument do you consider the concept of accusation nor the presumption of innocence. If you're shifting into a discussion of terrorism, you need to recognize #1 the serious problems of fear and fear mongering abridging the presumption of innocence and due process and #2 the ability (dare I say proclivity) of those in power to declare political enemies terrorists or treasonous.
Furthermore, you have also completely sidestepped the issue of who considers what a crime. An earlier reply attempted to highlight the reciprocal repercussions of your apparent assumption that we can start with a universal concept of what is "wrong". They weren't arguing for status quo. They simply weren't addressing your issues because they didn't agree with your assumptions.
Another problem with extradition is the assurance of a fair trial. Even if the laws are the same in both places, it may be an incredibly touchy issue where the accused will get an appropriately fair trial. I don't imagine at this moment that much of the world would consider the US an appropriate venue for a truly fair trial (or a trial at all).
But if we 1) assume guilt of said "criminals"; 2) assume we have a universal concept of "wrong" (i.e. crime), then here are my thoughts...
It immediately becomes a state vs. state issue at this point. It's not fuzzy at all unless you don't appreciate that any other state has sovereignty. And a whole lot of what happens next depends on the balance of the option(s) we choose to pursue vs. the costs related to such (extradition, covert ops, diplomacy, invasion/bombing, war). But these aren't new issues. These are the same issues we read of in antiquity ("toss his head over or we'll destroy your city"). In all these cases, it is a serious thing to weigh whether the issue truly merits such action or any action at all. For the more powerful states, like it or not, more options are available.
We don't truly have a world court and we really cannot unless/until the US amends the constitution to recognize a higher court that the SCOTUS and some sort of teeth is given to a world body to enforce any decisions of such.
What's bugging people here is that instead of the US submitting to a World Court, the US appears to pursuing the goal of BEING the World Court. People don't like bowing to laws they didn't create... sort of like "taxation without representation".
Sheesh. I finally get mod points and find I'd rather reply..
The article is absolutely not what I thought it'd be. I am not in full agreement with the reasons stated. Let me instead share why I believe I'll head in this direction very soon.
A the moment, I do run a variety of web servers and my own mail server. but these are barely used. For reliability issues many others have stated, if I had any commercial need for reliability I probably wouldn't continue to host myself.
Over the years I have listened with bemusement as my coworkers and friends relate their horror stories of what children can do with computers. It seems a certainty that if you run Windows on a computer of any sort and you put a small child in front of it with an Internet connection, in a reasonably short period of time you will be required to reinstall Windows on that PC. Indeed, I put my daughter in front of a Linux box (running Gnome I think) to play education games and she managed to remove ALL the menus.
What I plan on doing when I next upgrade hardware is creating two PCs. One will be more tailored for Windows (if necessary for games, work, etc.) and another as a Home Server running Linux. The wife's aging PC behind me gets tossed. She and each child get a thin client instead. I hope to be able to use virtualization as necessary to pump Windows, if required for children's games, etc. If they still manage to toast the OS, it should be a (very) simple issue of copying an image to restore it.
Furthermore, it appears the best solutions for access-control and filtering involve a proxy-server. I want to be able to control this easily rather than depend on others' decisions of what should be blocked, and to be able to move gradually from strict white-listing to filtering and less restrictions as children age.
I do intend for the Home Server to pump music and video as well. But my primary reason has nothing to do with Media Center nor hosting apps. It's simply a desire to provide multiple terminals to the family with the least required maintenance of physical PCs and related OSs.
I'm very surprised this wasn't discussed more in the article.
How exactly does one increase competition by reducing the number of players?
Please forgive me, but I am enormously skeptical of the ultimate purposes of this plan. At the highest level, this sounds very good. Many in India have benefited greatly as the benefits of telephony became available to them, especially the poor.
However...
This was not due to BSNL/MTNL. It was most recently due to a host of other players that dramatically lowered prices across the board for GSM phone and internet access. Mind you, there were many in India who decided to keep their original GSM phone service with these existing operators but who were simply thrilled at how Reliance and others forced prices to drop, and drop and drop.
TRAI seems to swing back and forth between who's been more effective at getting their people/policies/desires in there (cough, cough, buying them off, cough, cough).
The article seems to suggest the fight is now with the big, bad international carriers. But international calls have also dropped in price over the years due to competition. It's now actually cheaper for our relatives in India to call the US than the other way around.
And the statement in the article about internet traffic routing outside India and back in seems hilarious. I'd really like to dig deeper into that claim. It's obvious traffic to well known websites outside India are going to cause that effect.
In essence, this entire endeavor simply seems like a policy coup by the national operators to restore their position as the monopoly. Forgive me, but I'm very skeptical about their ability to perform here given their history. And I'm horribly concerned about the long-term effect of killing off competition.
Really? You're unfamiliar with near earth asteroids?
OK. Let's start with the Wikipedia reference which mentions that there are asteroids for which it would take less effort to reach than the moon.
Then here's a website discussing come co-orbitals, which are pretty close to the concept of "Earth-orbiting asteroid".
These are, of course, a lot further away than the moon. But they're not that much more difficult to reach and it's certainly a lot easier to take stuff away from them as compared to the moon. It just takes longer. For a lot of what people are considering there is no reason to transport stuff back down a gravity well. We want the stuff at the top of earth-moon gravity well(s) where these asteroids and material already are.
If you get to your destination "faster" than light, then by definition you were travelling faster than light. Barring weird stuff like teleportation, worm-holes or what not, this is not going to work.
There are several problems with what you describe.
First, if we take for granted you're correct that all we need to do is sit still and move the universe around us via a "great velocity moving body", then this just transfers the problem of faster than light travel from us to this "moving body". That is, how can one get this moving body moving faster than light? In all honesty, as described this seems exactly the issue at hand. How do we get a spaceship to carry us faster than light?
The speed of light (in a vacuum) is a limit in all (inertial) frames of reference. We're not going to overcome it by playing around with frames of reference. Your concept of calculating speed from a point of reference leads me to believe you're not altogether familiar with the issue that you cannot add relativistic speeds in the way we're used to doing for most things. For example, if you shot two cannonballs in opposite directions at 0.75c, the speed of the first cannonball when viewed from the second is not 1.5c. It is not greater than the speed of light because you don't simply add the speeds. Look here for a brief explanation: http://www.ertin.com/sloan_on_speed_of_light.html
Don't forget that with regards to travel to a destination, only a reference frame that includes us and the destination makes any sense. It seems altogether useless to consider that our "personal" speed is 0 since we're already where we are. Where we want to go is the destination.
Lastly, in your example, you are only at rest relative to yourself. With regards to your destination, you are going the same speed as the airplane. Furthermore, you're only at rest relative to the airplane itself when the airplane is not accelerating. Don't ignore GP's discussion of human limitations on acceleration.
I think I first read about the details of the Indian system while doing some work in India. I was rather pleased by the simplicity of their system in comparison to what has been the direction in the US in recent years.
I wish I had access to the articles I read. The Wikipedia article here doesn't seem to describe as well how the votes are actually accumulated nationwide.
The first thing you need to realize here, however, is that the system the Indians are using do not necessarily adequately address the concerns that are addressed in the NIST whitepaper here or in the electionarchive.org paper referenced earlier.
The beauty of the Indian system is its simplicity. However, given such simplicity a paper trail isn't feasible. The Indian system is electronic in the most basic meaning. It is not at all computer based. It would be more appropriate to think of these as something more similar to the mechanical lever systems especially when it comes to issues such as recounts. What exactly are you recounting for either system? You're not recounting on the level of each vote. You're reaccumulating at the level of each box.
Fraud is still possible with the Indian system. But it is made much, much more difficult by a number of constraints. One of these is the maximum number of votes per box. It is rather small. But this is causing some problems in and of itself as described in the Wikipedia article since the smaller the number of votes per box, the less your vote is truly anonymous.
An even more interesting point of debate here is the fact that the Indian system was more or less designed to avoid paper ballots since fraud was so much easier with paper ballots. I like the idea of using a GUI to choose votes but then creating a paper ballot to use via optical scanning for counting. But this brings us right back to the issue of preventing paper ballot stuffing.
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I find it rather hilarious how many mechanisms we have for communication these days.
But what is very interesting is the inconsistency of it all.
I use the following means to communicate to my peers at work:
Due to cost reduction efforts, many workers no longer have work cell phones nor pagers. But some do. Furthermore, many of us permit others to call us on our personal mobile phones but don't publish these numbers in the official directories.
Next, for a variety of reasons different individuals seem to prefer one channel over another. I often go very long periods without even bothering to check voice-mail (which when coupled with extensive telecommuting renders futile attempts to contact me via that channel). Some in my group simply won't use Internet Messaging. Some aren't as responsive to email.
A lot of this has to do with various coping mechanisms or frustrations. Some who do use IM get rather frustrated when half-a-dozen of us in a virtual meeting all conclude we need to involve them. Simultaneously they'll get half-a-dozen IMs asking questions or inviting them to join the meeting. Others of us cascade avenues of contact to minimize extra work. Those that need to know (i.e. management or close peers) do know how to reach us but all others are kept at arm's length so as to be able to prioritize work and avoid getting buried.
When I here the complaints of these workers regarding Blackberries, it seems as if they're rather afraid of the expectation of fast response to email. At the moment they likely have any old excuse for not responding to email promptly. That'll vanish overnight.
Did anyone notice the stark contrast between the view of the Executives and the workabees?
The Executives believe that the Blackberries can facilitate telecommuting and a balance between life and work. The grunts fear this is just a way to ensure longer workdays.
Why do you think that might be?
Could it be that relative to the workers, the execs don't really have that much work to balance with their life?
I think there is at least one other very important aspect here relative to telecommuting. Telecommuting really only works when there are a few key ingredients:
-
Trust. The manager needs to trust the worker.
-
A way to measure work. I find the managers the most comfortable with telecommuting, flex-time, etc., were those in situations where counting widgets was easy. If there is no clear way to measure output, this becomes a bit more of a challenge.
-
Good management, including proper escalation. My current management has clearly expressed that they expect routine escalation since we're understaffed. We're all comfortable about it since it then becomes the manager's job to prioritize. A bad manager simply attempts to appease everyone and twist the arms of employees to get them to do everything despite burnout.
If you are in a situation where the environment isn't already very comfortable with flex-time, telecommuting, etc., picking up a device which may lead others to expect immediate responses to email at all hours of the day may be a rather horrible idea.What will protect children from their own parents?
Why, the STATE, of course.
The first (stronger) may be debatable.
The second (taller) should be easily verifiable and out of the realm of argument.
The last (smarter) is the most easily debated of the three. It's offensive to most because you have judged yourself to be the smarter one and the other party may not agree. Furthermore, the first two describe where you are helping someone. The last example describes a situation where you may not be helping at all.
You may be stroking your own ego.
You may be judging them as stupid.
You may be impeding their growth by forcing them to continue to be dependent on you rather than helping them learn how to do said task.
You may be asking them to "trust" you more than they're willing. I can immediately see proof if you're able to lift said object. It's not nearly as clear for a great number of situations how to assess so quickly if you're truly as smart as you think you are. Furthermore, "smart" people are often very sloppy in their ability to document or to state clearly the reasons behind their conclusions. You may think faster, but it may not mean you think more clearly or more correctly.
No.
Do a bit of reading on the Suzuki method of teaching children how to play musical instruments. I'd suggest this here for a few reasons. First, Suzuki's fundamental underpinning of his entire work is simply that TALENT IS NOT INNATE. He absolutely did not support the idea you've presented that some people simply have more music ability. Next, this may help you understand what this new research is and is not stating.
It takes motivation, persistence AND some method of proper feedback for helpful assessment and correction.
For the Suzuki method, the feedback is (at least) two-fold: lots of guided practice from teachers and parents and an enormous amount of active listening so that your mind gets attuned to how things should sound.
Let's say for example, I'd like to develop perfect pitch. If I simply start singing "do-re-mi"'s all day long, I'll very likely just make things worse. I will probably lay down deep patterns of doing it the wrong way. I'd have to spend even more time to unlearn/relearn. But if I use something like a tuner or a computer program to assist/evaluate, then I imagine after a few thousand times of doing this, I'd get much, much better.
This recent research isn't suggesting any such nonsense as motivation and desire could make someone a great guitarist in a month. Nor that the most motivated and persistent would be the best after a month.
It's simply rather clearly and poignantly demonstrating a significant and measurable difference of what happens in children's approaches to learning and challenges when you focus praise on either 1) intelligence ("you're so smart") or 2) effort ("you really worked hard"). The praise of a state ("smart") influences kids to switch to a mode of protecting that image to a degree which impedes learning whereas the praise of the "hard work" influences them to tackle challenges with relish.
If the Scientific American write-up didn't adequately describe some of these easily repeatable experiments, look here: The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine
The results were so immediate and clear that it'd be like a medical study where the study was simply cut short and those given placebos were immediately switched to the real thing.
Isn't this just pretty much a direct consequence of the nature of TOR pretty much assuming that everyone uses it the way it was intended?
Or otherwise stated, TOR is like a flock of sheep where a wolf cannot bite down on one since they're all on some sort of merry-go-round? But a wolf could simply hop on the merry-go-round and feast?
As the article has repeated, if you're interested in security it seems you really ought to apply your own encryption on top of TOR.
However, even if you do that are you truly anonymous? Is there any way to determine both ends of a conversation (either email or sessions)?
And lest anyone forget this is a VERY REAL example...
I really had only barely paid attention to this issue till the patch for 2.3. Even then I often simply set up the download and forget about it. I simply wanted to download it early on Tuesday hours before I'd want to play.
But all of a sudden I realized my laptop (different PC) for work was incredibly sluggish. Pings via the VPN had shot up to well over 3 to 4 seconds. Pings from the PC downloading the patch were just as bad. Pings on the internal network (including to/from the PC downloading the patch) were absolutely fine.
Sure enough, once the download was done service went back to normal.
This is a completely legitimate, illegal in no way whatsoever, activity that is being hampered by this strange approach from this ISP.
The sorts of communications involved in MMORPGs are actually very similar to communications for a good amount of IT and consulting work.
Consider working remotely from home, multi-tasking with several IM chat conversations underway simultaneous with one or more telephone conference calls. This doesn't see too far from chats in game and coordination via email or phone in parallel.
Learning how to coordinate and guide these "self-isolated, socially inept, hyper-competitive" may indeed be similar in gaming and in IT and consulting work.
This doesn't discount your point that the majority of gamers may be such. But some are going to learn to excel in pulling these together to get stuff done.
However, having said that, your point about clarity is very important. Even when you work entirely remotely, the ability to think clearly and communicate in a measured, clear and appropriate fashion is enormously important. Gaming isn't the only place we see horrible communication these days though...
Nah... The movie that comes to my mind is completely different.
I am getting a picture of very clean cut, tall, dainty and somewhat immortal lithe man (with bow strapped across back, of course) darting back and forth across the plain. He sniffs here, looks there, describing what the signs indicate happened (all while you're seeing flashbacks to millions of years ago where the pack of raptors were hauling tail across the terrain with two little midget dinos tied to a couple raptors' backs because some dark T-Rex said "don't eat them".
That's some tracker...
I'm rather certain the root of your woes is Comcast. I am not certain it's intentional.
Furthermore, the problem is very likely far more simple and less sophisticated than this issue of packet spoofing.
Set up a continuous ping to something "nearby" (your gateway, your DNS ser ver, your neighbor, whatever) in your Comcast network and tee it to a file. Leave it up for days and you'll likely see periods of time where you have no service for patches of time... often long enough to kill sessions.
I very often have problems with any sort of sessions (SSH, VPN, etc.) staying up for long periods of time because the underlying line level reliability is so poor. I can watch my cable modem logs and see many resets, timeouts, etc.
I laugh whenever asked about phone service via Comcast. Sadly, however, this pathetic reliability also precludes Vonage and the like. And I find this a bit sad since while I do not consider Comcast capable of running a world class network, I loathe the phone company. Those guys are more competent but much more directly evil.
Just how do we get connected to this gravy train?
Can we just churn out some simple recordings, demonstrate it's theoretical pirating rates and call up somewhere to get some dough?
You're missing the larger point so badly you're wandering into a more grevious error.
The rights were declared "unalienable".
From the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
Note "self-evident" and "unalienable"!
Don't get hung up on reference to a Creator or a Diety. The idea here is that we didn't have to fight for these rights. We didn't have to steal them from the British or any other ruling power. We simply have always had them. To a theist, this is "given" or "endowed" by a Creator. But the principle that these rights are completely innate is not dependent on theism.
OK.
Maybe Randi's efforts don't truly matter in the grand scheme of things as one poster has mentioned.
But if there's one thing that website can do a very good job of, it's helping people understand the importance of and difficulty of crafting and executing proper double-blind tests.
I imagine I've been trolled. But your trivial snippets of "tests" of music or literature appreciation wouldn't in anyway shape or form qualify as double-blind tests. Goodness, I wouldn't even consider them anything other than cheap stunts providing no meaningful results whatsoever.
Please take the time to wander over to the JREF and especially the forums where you can read excruciatingly thorough discussions on the many audiophile type claims that are very similar to this. There is a great deal of information there provided by the claimants and forum members who have worked to hash out double-blind tests.
It will be more exciting when they are able to find planets the same size or same mass as ours.
It should be painfully obvious the author is Indian discussing Indian upper education. As such, it should be expected he'd use Indian Numbering rather than what you're used to.
t em
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_sys
Please take a bit to educate yourself with regards to lakh and crore so you won't mistake his approach as mistaken.
Oh... And someone please mod grandparent Informative now that I cannot.
I'm willing to cast a bit of doubt on the "innate" fear of strangers.
Do a bit of research on "attachment disorder" as it pertains to adopted children. Very often, young children when adopted demonstrate very little fear of strangers. Most of this is due to the fact that they have no attachment, per se, to their new family. Indeed, the root of this problem is that they may have never yet formed any deep attachment whatsoever. So, to them there is no inherent difference between their family and strangers. It's not that they fear and distrust everyone. It's more normal that they fear no one. They'll gleefully go home with anyone.
It's not at all uncommon for adoptive parents to have to train their new children with regards to "fear of strangers".
I believe that in the case of the Holocaust, you could make a very strong argument that indeed history was written by the conquered.
You can argue about motives, desires, aspirations, the collusion of the larger European society, the involvement of neutral countries, specifically their banks... You can debate any number of points.
But the funny thing is...
The Germans kept wonderfully accurate records of what they were doing. They were very meticulous.
In an enormously real way, the victors did not need to write the History of the Holocaust.
Holocaust Denial is an abomination simply because active and willful ignorance is dangerous. Holocaust Denial should be taught, but not as a way to present "balance" here. Instead, it needs to be presented as a psychological and pathological study of why in the world people fight so arduously to reinvent the past rather than to learn from it.
Although teachers that readily admit they will have students smarter than them are rare, they should be applauded. I definitely appreciated the ones I had.
I had a geometry/trigonometry teacher that often told us he expected the students to be smarter than him. Mind you, he wasn't just saying some students would occasionally know a piece of trivia or more about one small subject area. He meant that he firmly believe that he would often have students that were smarter than he was.
He was consistent about this. Once when he was writing a complicated trig proof, I held up my hand to comment. I told him he was being "a masochist" and replace his eight line proof with a two line one. He demonstrated no insecurity about this whatsoever but rather commended my idea. Indeed, I found the insecure teachers to be very dangerous.
Is it any surprise that if we have teachers that believe and inspire their students to believe that they will be smarter, do more, etc., that we progress? Is it any surprise that when teachers believe and force their students to believe that they do not know more and may never know more than they do that we as a nation are on a continued slide downwards by many measures?
When teachers cherish and relish learning and discovery, they inspire and instill this in the students. The blind regurgitation of facts ("dark" side of the moon, freezing temperature, etc.) is all the more disturbing because we don't teach people about how to think about how and why we know such things (which would involve understanding assumptions or exceptions).
Well... Basic likely generates ire because people believe much better programming languages and approaches exist.
If a child starts to learn to hang pictures with tape, well and good. As they grow they'll likely progress to thumbtacks, then nails. Soon they'll learn about screws, anchors, levels, stud-finders, etc. You don't consider it strange that a child hangs their artwork with tape. You find it bizarre when your adult friend attempts to use tape to hang their new Rembrandt. Ire arises when they ask you for help.
Now having said that, you raise a very interesting idea I hadn't considered lately of introducing children to programming with Basic. I imagine you may have to dig back to a "simple" Basic for the benefits, but it may be a good idea to start with simple instructions and logic and then progress to procedural and then object-oriented programming. I seem to remember reading arguments made by those who believe it best to start learning object-oriented first. I am not certain I ever fully agreed with that idea.
Well... First of all, it would appear for the purpose of this discussion we have to shift into a mode of presumed guilt. Notice nowhere in your argument do you consider the concept of accusation nor the presumption of innocence. If you're shifting into a discussion of terrorism, you need to recognize #1 the serious problems of fear and fear mongering abridging the presumption of innocence and due process and #2 the ability (dare I say proclivity) of those in power to declare political enemies terrorists or treasonous.
Furthermore, you have also completely sidestepped the issue of who considers what a crime. An earlier reply attempted to highlight the reciprocal repercussions of your apparent assumption that we can start with a universal concept of what is "wrong". They weren't arguing for status quo. They simply weren't addressing your issues because they didn't agree with your assumptions.
Another problem with extradition is the assurance of a fair trial. Even if the laws are the same in both places, it may be an incredibly touchy issue where the accused will get an appropriately fair trial. I don't imagine at this moment that much of the world would consider the US an appropriate venue for a truly fair trial (or a trial at all).
But if we 1) assume guilt of said "criminals"; 2) assume we have a universal concept of "wrong" (i.e. crime), then here are my thoughts...
It immediately becomes a state vs. state issue at this point. It's not fuzzy at all unless you don't appreciate that any other state has sovereignty. And a whole lot of what happens next depends on the balance of the option(s) we choose to pursue vs. the costs related to such (extradition, covert ops, diplomacy, invasion/bombing, war). But these aren't new issues. These are the same issues we read of in antiquity ("toss his head over or we'll destroy your city"). In all these cases, it is a serious thing to weigh whether the issue truly merits such action or any action at all. For the more powerful states, like it or not, more options are available.
We don't truly have a world court and we really cannot unless/until the US amends the constitution to recognize a higher court that the SCOTUS and some sort of teeth is given to a world body to enforce any decisions of such.
What's bugging people here is that instead of the US submitting to a World Court, the US appears to pursuing the goal of BEING the World Court. People don't like bowing to laws they didn't create... sort of like "taxation without representation".
Sheesh. I finally get mod points and find I'd rather reply..
The article is absolutely not what I thought it'd be. I am not in full agreement with the reasons stated. Let me instead share why I believe I'll head in this direction very soon.
A the moment, I do run a variety of web servers and my own mail server. but these are barely used. For reliability issues many others have stated, if I had any commercial need for reliability I probably wouldn't continue to host myself.
Over the years I have listened with bemusement as my coworkers and friends relate their horror stories of what children can do with computers. It seems a certainty that if you run Windows on a computer of any sort and you put a small child in front of it with an Internet connection, in a reasonably short period of time you will be required to reinstall Windows on that PC. Indeed, I put my daughter in front of a Linux box (running Gnome I think) to play education games and she managed to remove ALL the menus.
What I plan on doing when I next upgrade hardware is creating two PCs. One will be more tailored for Windows (if necessary for games, work, etc.) and another as a Home Server running Linux. The wife's aging PC behind me gets tossed. She and each child get a thin client instead. I hope to be able to use virtualization as necessary to pump Windows, if required for children's games, etc. If they still manage to toast the OS, it should be a (very) simple issue of copying an image to restore it.
Furthermore, it appears the best solutions for access-control and filtering involve a proxy-server. I want to be able to control this easily rather than depend on others' decisions of what should be blocked, and to be able to move gradually from strict white-listing to filtering and less restrictions as children age.
I do intend for the Home Server to pump music and video as well. But my primary reason has nothing to do with Media Center nor hosting apps. It's simply a desire to provide multiple terminals to the family with the least required maintenance of physical PCs and related OSs.
I'm very surprised this wasn't discussed more in the article.
How exactly does one increase competition by reducing the number of players? Please forgive me, but I am enormously skeptical of the ultimate purposes of this plan. At the highest level, this sounds very good. Many in India have benefited greatly as the benefits of telephony became available to them, especially the poor. However... This was not due to BSNL/MTNL. It was most recently due to a host of other players that dramatically lowered prices across the board for GSM phone and internet access. Mind you, there were many in India who decided to keep their original GSM phone service with these existing operators but who were simply thrilled at how Reliance and others forced prices to drop, and drop and drop. TRAI seems to swing back and forth between who's been more effective at getting their people/policies/desires in there (cough, cough, buying them off, cough, cough). The article seems to suggest the fight is now with the big, bad international carriers. But international calls have also dropped in price over the years due to competition. It's now actually cheaper for our relatives in India to call the US than the other way around. And the statement in the article about internet traffic routing outside India and back in seems hilarious. I'd really like to dig deeper into that claim. It's obvious traffic to well known websites outside India are going to cause that effect. In essence, this entire endeavor simply seems like a policy coup by the national operators to restore their position as the monopoly. Forgive me, but I'm very skeptical about their ability to perform here given their history. And I'm horribly concerned about the long-term effect of killing off competition.
Really? You're unfamiliar with near earth asteroids?
OK. Let's start with the Wikipedia reference which mentions that there are asteroids for which it would take less effort to reach than the moon.
Then here's a website discussing come co-orbitals, which are pretty close to the concept of "Earth-orbiting asteroid".
These are, of course, a lot further away than the moon. But they're not that much more difficult to reach and it's certainly a lot easier to take stuff away from them as compared to the moon. It just takes longer. For a lot of what people are considering there is no reason to transport stuff back down a gravity well. We want the stuff at the top of earth-moon gravity well(s) where these asteroids and material already are.
If you get to your destination "faster" than light, then by definition you were travelling faster than light. Barring weird stuff like teleportation, worm-holes or what not, this is not going to work.
There are several problems with what you describe.
First, if we take for granted you're correct that all we need to do is sit still and move the universe around us via a "great velocity moving body", then this just transfers the problem of faster than light travel from us to this "moving body". That is, how can one get this moving body moving faster than light? In all honesty, as described this seems exactly the issue at hand. How do we get a spaceship to carry us faster than light?
The speed of light (in a vacuum) is a limit in all (inertial) frames of reference. We're not going to overcome it by playing around with frames of reference. Your concept of calculating speed from a point of reference leads me to believe you're not altogether familiar with the issue that you cannot add relativistic speeds in the way we're used to doing for most things. For example, if you shot two cannonballs in opposite directions at 0.75c, the speed of the first cannonball when viewed from the second is not 1.5c. It is not greater than the speed of light because you don't simply add the speeds. Look here for a brief explanation: http://www.ertin.com/sloan_on_speed_of_light.html
Don't forget that with regards to travel to a destination, only a reference frame that includes us and the destination makes any sense. It seems altogether useless to consider that our "personal" speed is 0 since we're already where we are. Where we want to go is the destination.
Lastly, in your example, you are only at rest relative to yourself. With regards to your destination, you are going the same speed as the airplane. Furthermore, you're only at rest relative to the airplane itself when the airplane is not accelerating. Don't ignore GP's discussion of human limitations on acceleration.
I think I first read about the details of the Indian system while doing some work in India. I was rather pleased by the simplicity of their system in comparison to what has been the direction in the US in recent years.
I wish I had access to the articles I read. The Wikipedia article here doesn't seem to describe as well how the votes are actually accumulated nationwide.
The first thing you need to realize here, however, is that the system the Indians are using do not necessarily adequately address the concerns that are addressed in the NIST whitepaper here or in the electionarchive.org paper referenced earlier.
The beauty of the Indian system is its simplicity. However, given such simplicity a paper trail isn't feasible. The Indian system is electronic in the most basic meaning. It is not at all computer based. It would be more appropriate to think of these as something more similar to the mechanical lever systems especially when it comes to issues such as recounts. What exactly are you recounting for either system? You're not recounting on the level of each vote. You're reaccumulating at the level of each box.
Fraud is still possible with the Indian system. But it is made much, much more difficult by a number of constraints. One of these is the maximum number of votes per box. It is rather small. But this is causing some problems in and of itself as described in the Wikipedia article since the smaller the number of votes per box, the less your vote is truly anonymous.
An even more interesting point of debate here is the fact that the Indian system was more or less designed to avoid paper ballots since fraud was so much easier with paper ballots. I like the idea of using a GUI to choose votes but then creating a paper ballot to use via optical scanning for counting. But this brings us right back to the issue of preventing paper ballot stuffing.